The Ground Beneath Our Feet

Finished Robert Harris's excellent Pompeii yesterday just before the concert, sitting in the Starbucks located at Marina Square, just across the road from the Esplanade. Wonderfully imagined tale, quite slow-moving in the initial chapters as you are led into the world of the engineers responsible for maintaining the aqueducts and into the corruption of the main boom town, Pompeii, on a booming coast. Then gathering pace as a plot emerges based around the aquarius, Attila, and his love interest, who happens to be the daughter of the most corruptly doubtful of all the inhabitants of Pompeii. Oh, and some wonderful stuff about the venerable Pliny, at this point the overweight admiral of the imperial fleet.

At then comes the eruption of Vesuvius, which you know is on the way and yet still manages to surprise somehow. After that, a series of descriptions better than any disaster movie because of their wonderful detail and sense of the actual in action.

So it was quaffing the remains of my café latte that I enjoyed the various fates of the key members of the cast so cunningly assembled by the author, and very satisfying they were too. But the deeper success of the novel lay in its genuine sense of contemporary concerns in these ancient matters. Put simply, the reader was made to feel dwarfed by the ferocious and uncaring power of Nature, and the puniness of man in comparison - even the genuinely tough and in many ways estimable Romans lovingly detailed and understood by Harris.

And here's a curious thing: I couldn't help but think as I read of how the frontage of the shopping mall in which I was so delightfully killing the twenty-five minutes I had to spare was being dug up for some kind of renovation even as I quaffed. Surely, all quite unnecessary! I remember the building being newly opened not that long ago. And this seems typical of this modern city which seems to shrug off vestiges of its former self in almost any location you can think of with remarkable insouciance. It just so happens that I have fond memories of the steps outside which made up said frontage. The school in which I first worked here used the location for a series of fund-raising concerts for two or three years in the 1990s (pre-history, now, I suppose.) I'm guessing that it's not just my memories that will have been chipped away at but those of any number of teachers and students who gathered to make something a bit special, a bit memorable.

We don't need eruptions any more to sweep away the ground on which we stand.